Okay, what happened? I just got here, and it's already
five days later!

Friday, March 16

Friday was a blur. Pat Scannon, Joe
Maldangesang and Dan O'Brien met the folks at BAC/HPO (Bureau of Arts & Culture
/ Historical Preservation Office) - Suzanne Finney, staff archaeologist & Kelly
Marsh, ethnographer - to sign our yearly agreement and memo of understanding
on what we want to do while we're
in Palau: conduct research concerning searching for MIAs, and interview
local Palauans. It is almost one-stop shopping, because they had the
permits for Koror State in hand for us. What a deal!

We made some phone calls
to
follow up on leads already happening. Speaking of phones, last year when
we left,
Flip gave our phone to some local friends to hold and use occasionally,
so we didn't lose our phone number - they're basically prepaid pay-as-you-go
phones. The plan is they will return it to us we arrive in Palau. Said
friends
are out of country and phone is not to be found. We are told they will
be back on Tuesday. No problem - we can wait. This will become an issue
soon in this update.

So without the staff photographer in country (read Flip) we missed the
photo op at BAC/HPO. More of that will continue until Flip arrives.

Went by Coral Reef Research Foundation to check in with the whiz kids
and their AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles), and also to see if
we could beg, borrow or buy a lens for the GoPro
camera
so the
underwater
view is not distorted. Flip failed to read that in the owners manual of
his new camera, which they fail to tell you. But since CRRF has about
20 GoPros that they set up all over the Palau reefs, they know a few things
about what really works well underwater.

Stopped in at the Civic Action Team (CAT) headquarters, currently
staffed by Navy SeaBees, to say Hi. Interviewed a guide in Airai about
an airplane crash
site he has tried to guide us to twice over the past
5 years
with no luck.
Made several more phone calls and drop-bys with no results except messages
left.

We're trying to pinpoint the cockpit area of the Corsair to assist
JPAC when they come to do a recovery of the MIA. This Corsair exploded
above
the mangroves and
we have
yet to find a piece bigger than a coffee table.

So, Joe calls the hotel and we plan to meet up at the entry road
to Ngaremlengui off the "compact road," which is the nice new
smooth road that runs all the way around the big island of Babelthuap.
The creation of this road was underwritten through the "Compact of Free
Association" between Palau and the United States). This is the part where
no cell phone comes in. So we arrive just prior to the
designated
time of 10:30 a.m. No Joe. We wait, a nice shelter is here for a bus stop,
brand
new, nice bench seats (staff photog is still not with us, so no pic
of bus stop). We enjoy the quiet, chat about life, liberty, the pursuit
of happiness.
We wait. Ok, a new plan: I will drive the 4-5 miles in toward
the dirt road turnoff to the old lighthouse and the mangroves to see if
Joe
is waiting there, Pat will stay at the bus stop and ride in with
Joe when he arrives. I drive in, I drive out, no Joe. Pat is still waiting.
We still
have no cell phone. Two hours later, we flag down somebody headed
into Ngaremlengui, ask if we can borrow their cell phone to call Joe. Yup,
he
forgot his
cell phone, BUT he is dropping off Mom and will call Joe from her
house and then head back out to tell us the message from Joe. We wait.......some
local folks doing some taro farming stop in at the bus stop to have
lunch
in the beautiful shade and they try to call Joe, BUT there's no cell
reception here. We wait. OK, here comes our guy with the phone message
from Mom's
house
and guess who is following him? Yup, it's Joe. It seems Joe got
to our meet point early, thought he missed us and drove in to the 8-inch
guns and
waited there.

Hey, we got a group picture taken without Flip's help. Actually, this is from
the archives - 2011.
L-R: Wesley Abbey, Flip Colmer, Dan O'Brien, Derek Abbey, Molly Osborne, Pat
Scannon, and Joe Maldangesang.
It's at one of the 8-inch guns where Joe was waiting for us...this year.

It's now 1 p.m., no time to really attack the mangroves, tide
is coming back in and time to head home.
Lesson learned: always carry a cell phone.

Monday, March 19

We are going to make it into those mangroves yet. Joe
meets us at the hotel, so he does not lose us. We purchase a new cell
phone, stop
and buy some air time at the phone store, and we're ready to go.

The
words for today are: successful, exhilarating, physical, hydration, man-am-I-tired-but-feel-really-good!
We found 18 new parts of the Corsair! We're getting a more defined
pattern of where certain parts are clustered.
3.5 hours
in the mangrove, 40-minute round trip hike from the van to the start
point...a good day.

Rather than write a thousand more words right now, I'll just show
you a few pics:

Wanna spend an afternoon in the mangrove swamp? Here's what we get to
crawl through.
All afternoon. That stuff at the bottom is water. And mud. Lots of mud.

Pat Scannon and Dan O'Brien AFTER fun in the mangroves.

Corsair parts.

More Corsair parts: aluminum wing rib structure. If those little yellow
rulers were worth much,
every AOPA member in the world would be rich.